Results of Evolve a Band Name!

Here are the results from yesterday’s Evolve a Band Name experiment. The top three names were ‘Chessclub’, ‘Cloaca’ and ‘Protons versus Neutrons’! I have to say, there is a lot of creativity evident in the data! Also, a technical oversight on my part leads to a lesson about cultural evolution…

Method
Participants were presented with 10 band names for 20 seconds. They had to memorise them and then they were asked to reproduce each one. They entered names one at a time and were prevented from entering names that they had already entered. After entering 10 names, the participants were given a score (based on Levenshtein distance). Their names were recorded and passed on to the next participant as their input. At the time of writing, 144 trials had been recorded.

The analysis was complicated by a technical oversight. I assumed that only one person would play this at a time. I was running many chains (14) in parallel, and each person is assigned to a chain when they log in, but the chain list was not updated until they finished the experiment. The result is that a single chain could split into many chains, and I had no way of automatically recovering the history of transmission. Lesson learned. If you’d like to see the raw data, look here (each line is a generation, each name separated by an underscore, first 7 lines of each file is the initial random stimuli).

Results
Here’s an analysis done by hand (click to expand).

None of the original words make it to the end of the chain. The ends of the chains are fairly deteriorated, as you might expect. Since the program forces participants to enter unique names, then there all strings are different, but they’ve regressed to repeated characters or characters that are close to each other on the keyboard.

Obviously, there are some strong prior biases – Names that relate to the task (‘I don’t know”, “my memory sucks”) and the context of the experiment (Replicated typo, evolutionary linguistics, the acacia tree in-joke etc.). But the real striking thing is the short lifespan of names – people invent a lot of names. This is probably due to the very tight bottleneck: There was only 20 seconds to memorise 10 names.

There are some nice instances of mutation such as ‘nomsky’ -> ‘chomsky’ and ‘Terrific Gandalf’s Purse’ -> ‘Terrific Gandalf’s Curse’. There’s even a bit of recombination: In another chain, ‘Space Monster’ and ‘Shape Grenade’ merge to become ‘Shape Monster’. There’s also something that looks like selection for salience: ‘Irridescent Glue Stick’ becomes just ‘Glue’, then ‘GLUE’. It also gets gradually closer to the top of the list (people remembered it earlier). There are a few instances of borrowing: The ‘Magnotta’ variations are introduced by one player in two chains. I particularly liked the evolution of “Power Hungry Tokyo Takedown” -> “Super Power Tokyo Takedown” -> “Super Power Tokyo Beatdown”.

Below you can see the average similarity of strings within a generation over time (left) and the largest common substring within a generation over time. None of these indicate much of a change, apart from at the very end for largest common sub-string.

However, the average length of band names tends to decrease.

The best band name

In order to judge which was the best band name, the best I could do was look at the frequency of variants. I wanted to count variations of the same idea together, so the names were grouped automatically based on Levenshtein distance and the longest common sub-string.

Of course, this isn’t entirely fair because of some chains split more, giving their names more of a chance to be copied. In other words, it confounds names that were passed culturally, and names that have a strong prior bias and arose independently. For example, a band name of the ‘Something X’ type evolved independently several times. This is, in fact, Galton’s problem, and has been discussed recently by Levinson & Gray (2012). The evolution of cultural traits is difficult because there are general patterns in the languages of the world, but it’s very hard to decide whether they have arisen because of the cognitive biases of humans, or are the product of being passed on by cultural transmission.

And finally, here’s the eleven (to commemorate Spinal Tap) most frequent band name variants that are not obviously cop-outs:

Chessclub

Cloaca

Neutrons v Protons

The Mathemagicians

Apeway

You me and alexander

Acacia Emergency

The Iterators

The F*ck Yeahs

Pocket Horse

Beeswing

I am not calling my band Chessclub, besides I found two bands and a record label called Chess Club. Astoundingly Cloaca is also taken, even though it means fish anus. Therefore, I declare the winner ‘Neutrons v Protons‘!

However, some of the others are possibilities. I have to say, though, there was an awful lot of creativity, and honorable mentions go to Nameocolypse, Overwhelming Larger Animals, Leaked Memory, Owl Man, There will be Penguins, Calm a Lama Down and Sean’s Lusty Hips.

And here are all the names, sorted by their frequency of appearance in the experiment. The counts include mutations of the original.

I’d guess you would’ve gotten less junk of the “…” and “I don’t know” sort if you’d provided a “stop here, I honestly don’t remember any of the others” button, filling up the remainder of the next participant’s stimulus with more random names from the original source.